THE WEARY CHILDREN: CONRAD LEARNS TO LEAP
“For oh,” say the children, “we are weary,
And we cannot run or leap—
If we cared for any meadows, it were merely
To drop down in them and sleep.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Cry of the Children”
The Gifford twins, Julie and Stevie, were in their front yard with Reed, who was knocking icicles from the eaves with a broom’s handle, when the Craft car went by pulling its orange U-Haul. Christopher Craft, who had known briefly what it was like to be in the shoes of Miles Standish, waved a quick good-bye. Reed waved back—Christopher had been in his class—but Stevie threw a glassy chunk of ice that had dropped from the eaves. It hit the rear fender of Davey Craft’s car with a dull thud. The brake lights on the U-Haul came on immediately, and Stevie dropped to his belly behind Pike’s old Chevy clunker and lay low, waiting. But Davey Craft must have decided there were more serious things to contend with. The brake lights went off and the Craft car kept on its way to Connecticut. Stevie got to his feet again, a cold grin on his face. Another successful ambush, the fifth that day alone.
“Why’d you go and do that?” asked Reed. He swung his arm quickly and cuffed Stevie—too slow to duck—briskly on the head.
“Ow!” said Stevie. “Bastard! I’m gonna go tell Mama.”
“You leave Mama alone,” said Reed. “She’s got enough to worry about.” He went back to the icicles, their long, silver bodies breaking musically into bits and pieces beneath the broom.
“Stevie is a crybaby,” said Julie. She was sitting on the frozen snow of the front steps, sucking on the tapered peak of an icicle.
“You can catch a disease from eating icicles,” said Stevie. “That’s why Tanya Craft is sick and her parents have to take her to Connecticut. She ate a whole bunch of icicles, and now there’s a zillion worms living in her stomach and her stomach is full of big holes.”
“Yuck!” said Julie, and threw the icicle down. The taper stuck point-first into the snow by the steps.
“He’s lying,” said Reed. He leaned the broom against the front door and opened it. On the rug, inside, he paused to wipe his boots. That was something Conrad was always telling him to do. Conrad had been worse than an old woman at times.
In the warm kitchen, Lynn was making luncheon-meat sandwiches. “Tell the twins to come eat,” she said. She put a plate of sandwich halves on the table, and then found a large can of chunky vegetable soup.
“Sandwiches!” Reed shouted out the door. “And wipe your boots here on the rug, or take them off.” Lynn smiled.
“I don’t want a sandwich if it’s got olives in it,” Julie announced. She and Stevie were pulling off their snowy boots. “I want a slice of meat that don’t have olives.” She threw her coat down by the kitchen table.
“Julie, put your coat away,” said Lynn, exasperation in her voice. “Ain’t I told you that a million times? Don’t just drop it wherever you happen to stop.”
“Them ain’t olives,” Stevie whispered in Julie’s ear. “Them is frog eyes.” He shucked off his coat next to Julie’s on the floor.
“Pick them up, dammit,” said Reed. He grabbed up both coats and went into the living room with them. Lynn watched him go.
“He’s taking over for Conrad,” Lynn thought, and she wondered if that was good or bad. She and Reed had already gone to their first counseling meeting in Watertown, earlier in the day, something they would do weekly. “It’s never too soon after a tragedy to seek help,” the psychologist had told Lynn. Reed was holding far too much anger inside—that’s what the psychologist said. But Lynn knew anyone would be blind not to see that. The psychologist was fat and had a funny habit of squinting his eyes, but he was teaching Lynn and Reed how to grieve. His office had real leather sofas and lots of thick books. His fingers were manicured. He looked to Lynn as though he had never grieved in his life.
“Reed will have to come to terms with his father,” the psychologist had said to Lynn. No kidding, Lynn thought. “He’s hurting very much inside,” the psychologist said, “for his big brother.” You must have one of them crystal balls! But Lynn didn’t say this. The state was paying this man, not she. And it was true that Reed’s anger at his father was a major factor. Pike was still at Billy’s house, living on there with Ronny, who seemed perpetually without career plans. Pike Gifford was now enrolled in the AA program in Watertown, orders of the social worker who had come to visit the family two days after the memorial service.
“Julie, you’ll eat what I make,” Lynn said. She didn’t care what program Pike took, as long as he never came back into her house. The children could visit him if they wanted to, but Lynn was finished with his promises.
“I don’t care if he’s been to the Betty Ford Clinic,” Lynn had said when Maisy called her with a message from Pike.
“He says he’s learned his lesson this time,” said Maisy, who was not convinced. “He says he’s in counseling now, and they tell him he’s got a good chance of getting well.”
“Where’s Conrad’s chance?” Lynn had shouted. “You ask him that the next time he calls.”
“Don’t yell at me,” Maisy reminded her. “I ain’t ever liked the son of a bitch. He’s a snake in the grass as far as I’m concerned, and always will be. I’m just telling you what he asked me to tell you. He says give him a year and then see. Don’t make up your mind yet.”
“Tell him I hope he’s dead in a week,” Lynn said. “Tell him never mind about no year.” Didn’t Pike realize that this time it was different? His son was dead! Pike Gifford might as well tell Lynn that he was taking crochet lessons and doing extremely well. It would have as much impact.
“He says he had Ronny drop the Chevy off ’cause he knew you’d need it,” Maisy had told her. Lynn had intended to ask for the car anyway, in her latest divorce petition. Now she wouldn’t have to fight for it, piece of junk that it was.
“Stevie ain’t learned his lines yet for the play,” said Julie.
“Stevie!” Lynn said, and he jumped, his sandwich flopping apart in his hand. She put a bowl of chunky soup in front of him. “What did you promise me? You said you’d be sure to learn them lines. That’s the only way I let you be in the play. Don’t poke at them sandwiches with your spoon.”
“All I got to say is, ‘I am Chief Mash-ah-something,’” said Stevie, his mouth full of sandwich.
“It’s Chief Massasoit,” said Julie. “The teacher’s told him a thousand times. And that ain’t all he’s supposed to say, Mama.”
“What else you supposed to say?” Lynn asked. She had taken a sandwich for herself, but left it on her plate with just two bites missing.
“Your appetite’ll come back one day,” Maisy had said. “Just try not to starve until then.”
“He’s supposed to say, ‘I have come with ninety braves and five deer to celebrate this day.’ But he’s too stupid,” said Julie.
“I ain’t neither stupid,” said Stevie. He kicked at Julie’s leg beneath the table. “All you have to say is gobble gobble.”
“Quit!” said Julie.
“Stop it, both of you,” Lynn said. She had been watching Reed, who was having his own kind of trouble with his appetite.
“How about you, Reed?” Lynn asked. “Have you memorized your part?” Reed nodded, but he wasn’t paying close attention to his mother. He was looking instead at the kitchen window, remembering mere days ago when Pike Gifford had come and peered inside at his family having breakfast. Just as the Indians had first peered at the Pilgrims. It could have all been different—that was the awful thought plaguing Reed. It could have been prevented if he or Conrad had been in charge. But they were kids. The adults called the shots when it came to this crazy grown-up game. They ain’t fighting, Reed had told Conrad that day, they’re hugging.
“Well, rec
ite a little bit of it for me,” said Lynn. “Ain’t you the narrator or something?”
“He’s got the biggest part of anybody,” said Julie. “He’s got a longer part than Bernie Henderson, who’s gonna play Miles Standish now that Christopher Craft is gone.”
“Say some of it, honey,” Lynn urged. She pushed the doughnut box closer to Reed’s plate. He would be thin as a rail if this kept up, but then so would she.
“Go on,” Lynn urged, in her life-going-on-as-usual voice. But only the twins, she knew, could be fooled.
“‘The year was 1620, and the month was September, when the Mayflower set sail for America,’” Reed said, his voice soft and dramatic. “‘The passing was long and dangerous, the ship overcrowded. A baby was born at the height of the storm, and many came close to death. But only one Pilgrim died in the crossing.’” His voice broke. He stared at the box of doughnuts, all chocolate coated, from a bakery way down in Bangor. He wondered if any little boys down there were sitting at tables right then, with their families, happy to be there, happy they were all alive. Thankful, even. “‘It was November before they dropped anchor, but their troubles were not over, for the land was hostile to them, the plague would soon be upon them, and winter was coming fast,’” Reed continued, his voice barely audible. He stopped.
“It ain’t Bernie who’s gonna be Miles Standish,” said Stevie.
“Yes it is,” Julie insisted. “It is too.”
“Bernie says he’s getting a car for Christmas,” said Stevie. “And he’s only eight.”
“He’s lying, stupid,” said Julie. “Now shhh! The part is coming up soon where everybody gives thanks.”
“Go on, Reed,” said Lynn. She had tears in her eyes. She wouldn’t say so to the children, but it would be a long time before she gave any thanks to God. As far as Lynn Gifford was concerned, she owed God jack shit. “It’s really pretty,” she added. But Reed stood up, his chair toppling behind him.
“If he ever comes back here,” Reed said, and at first Lynn thought he was still reciting, thought he was addressing the plague, giving it some human form. “If he’s ever allowed in this house again, I’ll kill him. And I won’t miss neither, like Conrad did. That’s what I’m gonna do if you ever let him come back.” He threw his spoon on the table—a clattering noise, a sharp period to a painful sentence. Sometimes, Reed had come to realize, children are the ones who should make the rules.
***
“What you doing, honey?” Lynn asked later when she went into Reed’s bedroom, the one he had shared with Conrad. He was lying on the bed, his legs spread, his arms beneath his head. Spook, the dog, slept by his side, a mass of cockapoo curls. “You know Spook ain’t supposed to be on the bed.” She petted the curly fur. It was pretty common knowledge that although Lynn made large statements about Spook’s limited territory, he even slept on her bed when he pleased.
Conrad’s side of the bed was covered with the packets of his old collection: two hundred and fifty-three jams and honeys, who knew how many sugars. Lynn looked away quickly.
“Why have you got them out again?” she asked, but Reed said nothing. “It’ll only make you feel worse. It ain’t gonna bring Conny back.” Still he said nothing. He was thinking of Thanksgiving, and of all the people around the world who would have reasons to give thanks, no matter how tough life had been to them. People like the Pilgrims. In the background, New Kids on the Block were singing on the Radio Shack stereo Lynn had gotten the boys as a shared Christmas present the year before. Now it seemed years ago that she had done such a thing. Lifetimes.
“Don’t stay up here and listen to music all afternoon, okay?” Lynn said. The twins had gone back to school the day after Conrad’s memorial service, but Reed stayed home. Lynn agreed that he needed more time before facing his classmates. The twins were resilient; Reed was not. Now Thanksgiving was only two days away. The twins would spend half of the following day in school, and then vacation would officially begin. On the following Monday, though, Lynn was hoping that Reed would gather up his school books and be ready to try it once again. “Maisy’s coming over and we’re gonna make a big pan of fudge. The weatherman says it’s gonna snow like hell tomorrow, and tomorrow night, and the next day. And even the day after Thanksgiving. If it does, they’ll have to cancel the Thanksgiving dinner at the school.”
“And the play?” asked Reed.
“Well, if it snows so hard no one can get out of their yards, sweetie, I suppose the play will be canceled too.”
“Good,” said Reed. “I didn’t want to do it anyway.”
“Miss Kimball said you didn’t have to, Reed,” Lynn reminded him. “I think it was awful nice of her to call and talk to you about it. She thinks it’d be good for you, especially since you was looking forward to it.”
“No I wasn’t,” said Reed. “She talked me into it.”
“Honey, I thought you loved being the narrator,” said Lynn. “And you been practicing that part for almost a month now.” She rubbed his belly with her fingers, circular caresses. She could feel his bony rib cage, holding up the house of his body. “I heard you practice them lines to Conrad a lot of times.”
Reed said nothing. He turned his head toward the music coming from the stereo. It would be great to be a new kid in a new house on a new block in a new town. Conrad’s new house was the tiny cement morgue marking the entry into the Catholic graveyard. He would live there until spring, until the land was ready, as it was when the Pilgrims planted their first crops.
“Is it because Conny’s gone that you don’t want to do them lines?” Lynn asked. “If that’s the case, you can practice them on me.”
“I don’t want to, Ma,” said Reed. He closed his eyes. He hoped the snow covered the whole damn school building, so deep that not even the chimneys could be seen. He wished all the rest of his life would be canceled, not just school, not just a dinner.
“I gotta go keep them little monsters from tearing each other apart,” Lynn said. She had heard the musical notes of a fight rising up from the kitchen table, spoons being knocked against glasses, plates vibrating. “Don’t stay up here forever. I’ll yell to you when the fudge starts to harden.”
Reed listened as her footsteps retreated down the stairs, the soft footfalls of his mother. The album finished playing and then started over again, a wonderful little mechanism inside directing it onward, instructing it, making all its big decisions. He heard the wind start up strong and fierce, beating around the leafless birch outside his window. On snowy nights, before Conrad grew so silent, the boys used to gather there, at the window, and watch the snow swirl in over the Mattagash River.
Then Reed heard Maisy downstairs, her voice loud and fake with optimism. Freddy was with her, Freddy, whose birthday party Pike had crashed a week and a half earlier. Reed lifted himself up from his bed and the springs creaked beneath him like ice cracking. He gathered up Conrad’s jams and honeys and sugars, packed them back into the shoe boxes, then put them under the bed, in their usual safe spot. They might come in handy one day. They might be a kind of windfall, such as the Pilgrims had found in Indian corn.
At the window he knelt, tried to pry it up with the palms of his hands. It would be nice to breathe a cold, sharp breath of river air. But the window was stuck, frozen solid with winter. Reed knew all about early winters in northern Maine. The Pilgrims hadn’t been the only unlucky ones, had they? They could have been even unluckier. They could have dropped anchor farther north than Cape Cod. They could have scraped to shore where the Mattagash River meets the St. John, just as the old loyalist settlers had.
Reed watched the gray jays loading up with the bread scraps his mother had tossed out on the frozen snow of the backyard. Sandwiches neither he nor Lynn could eat. Snow lay on the hills, and in the sky over the trees, threatening to fall. Reed had read in his geography book that Maine is eighty percent forest. Growing up in Mattagash, he had
always thought it might be much more than that, maybe ninety-nine—that other percent being given over to the rivers and roads. But whatever the percentage of trees was, snow loomed above Mattagash’s share.
“‘After that first dreadful winter of the plague,’” Reed said, his breath warm against the window, “‘after that first spring when half their number had perished, they still found it within their hearts to give thanks to God, for they still had their crop of Indian corn to keep them.’”
BAGELS IN MATTAGASH: THE MAYFLOWER AS A BEER JOINT
No written record exists to indicate what foods might have been served, but we can be fairly certain that the menu included roast turkey, roast goose, roast duck, roast venison, several kinds of meat pie, baked fish, steamed lobster, steamed clams, steamed oysters, Indian-style corn bread, and a large assortment of vegetables, fruits, berries, nuts, and jellies. Since their supply of beer was exhausted while they were still living on the Mayflower, the abundance of grapes gave them an opportunity to make wine, a not-unacceptable substitute for the beverage they missed so much.
—Leo Bonfanti, The Massachusetts Bay Colony, details of the first Thanksgiving (parts bowdlerized for the Mattagash play)
Dorrie Mullins was peering out of Alice Gurley’s kitchen window when the Craft car and its orange U-Haul came slowly around the turn, past the ruins of the Albert Pinkham Motel. Dorrie had been checking the sky for snow, worried that this time the weathermen down in Bangor were right.
“I’ll be damned,” said Dorrie. “There they go.”
“Who?” asked Lola, and pushed her way in past Dorrie’s huge frame so that she, too, could see.
“Davey and Charlene.”
“Who are Davey and Charlene?” asked Alice Gurley, their hostess.
“I’m getting tears in my eyes,” said Lola. “Me and Davey’s been close as lice since we was little kids.”
The Weight of Winter Page 38
